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Adding Life to Years
A different strategy for dealing with unwanted thoughts: Put them at arm's length
On our faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno, we have a psychology professor, Steven C. Hayes, who goes around saying something surprising for a psychologist:
"Happiness is not normal.”
When you read that, you might think that's just what you'd expect a psychologist to say. If people were happy all the time, psychologists would have no patients.
In reality, his conclusion runs counter to the way clinical psychology has traditionally viewed the human condition. Most psychologists tell people they need to confront
unwanted thoughts and beliefs with the goal of eliminating them. But if you believe having painful thoughts and feelings is normal, as Dr. Hayes does, then it would be abnormal to eliminate them.
The approach that Hayes and colleagues have pioneered goes like this: Instead of fighting unwanted, debilitating thoughts, we can learn to regard them as just that - thoughts and feelings, things separate from us. And if they are separate from us, they cannot control us.
This approach is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT, and if that term rings a bell it's probably because Time magazine carried a five-page article on ACT and Dr. Hayes two years ago (Feb. 13, 2006).
That kind of national attention should tell you something about how interesting and different and promising ACT therapy is. I hope you were able to attend the free lecture by Dr. Hayes April 2 at UNR. He was the final speaker in our Silver Series free talks on healthy aging this winter and spring, all of which focused on achieving happiness.
Before I tell you more about ACT, recall what Dr. Hayes says about unhappiness being normal. The numbers back him up. As he wrote in a column for the London Telegraph:“Over 30 percent of the population will have a psychiatric disorder sometime in their lives. Nearly 50 percent will struggle with thoughts of suicide for two weeks or more. Divorce rates reach similar levels; second marriages are no better; and the relationships that remain are often restricted or empty. If we add in the rates of emotional or physical abuse, sexual concerns, loneliness, burnout, problems with children, or 100 other such problems we need to consider the possibility that it is human pain is that is nearly universal. In effect it is abnormal to be 'normal.'”
To that mountain of evidence you can add the case of one Steven Hayes. Early in his academic career he suffered from near-paralyzing panic attacks, he says. He would become so fearful that he could barely lecture to his classes. He almost never went out to restaurants or used elevators.
Yet he says he hasn't suffered a panic attack in more than a decade. In fact, he has gone on to a stellar academic career. A past president of the Association for Behavior and Cognitive Therapies, he is also the author of the best-selling self-help book Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life. He has written or co-written 32 books and more than 400 peerreviewed articles.
What helped him escape from panic attacks was the realization that desiring escape was only feeding more power to the anxiety. The problem, he writes, is that when we feel pain, we are always tempted to want to “leapfrog into a desired future from which inner troubles have evaporated.”
Instead, ACT teaches people to remain in the present and regard those unwanted thoughts and feelings as “mental events.” Or, to use analogy inspired by meditation, to imagine them as leaves floating by on the surface of a stream. Dr. Hayes told Time that his newfound perspective allowed him to accept that anxiety would happen, and that understanding allowed him to separate himself from it.
Instead of saying, “I'm depressed,” an ACT client would be encouraged to say, “I'm having the thought that I'm depressed.” At a certain point this strategy can become almost playful. You feel unwanted thoughts of panic, depression or incompetence coming on? You can say to yourself, “Thank you, mind, for that thought” and move on.
Dr. Hayes reports that this approach has helped clients deal with a wide range of problems, including burnout, smoking, pain, prejudice, stress, depression, even diabetes management.
To learn more about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, I encourage you to read the Time magazine article on Dr. Hayes, which is available online at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,1156613,00.html
(Lawrence J. Weiss, Ph.D. is director of the University of Nevada, Reno Sanford Center for Aging and an adjunct associate professor of medicine. He welcomes your comments on this column. Write to him at weisslj@unr.edu or c/o Sanford Center for Aging, Mail Stop 146, Reno, NV 89557-0146.)